We rode in a railroad-motor along one of the several railroad tracks on the broad crest of the dam; its sides sloped down to a quarter of a mile away on each side. Halting the car about a hundred feet from the edge of the spillway, Colonel Sibert pointed directly down at the mass beneath our feet, and said:
“Eighty or so feet below us lies the site of old Gatun. Morgan and his buccaneers spent their first night there on their way up the Chagres to the sack of old Panama, and it was a famous stopping-place for travelers in the days of the Forty-niners. When we began work here in 1907 there was an island in the river, with a village of fifty thatched huts and a church on it. Now the village is over back of us, and big enough to need three separate fire companies; and the island’s gone, and the river’s gone, and there’s where the railroad used to run along its bank.”
The colonel pointed to where the tops of a few old telegraph-poles made a straight line across the surface of the lake.
“And the river, Colonel, where have you put that?” we asked.
“Here.” He led the way to the edge of the spillway, the concrete-lined artificial channel, larger than the original river-bed and hewn through a natural hill of living rock, that carries off the surplus water of Gatun Lake. Last rainy season a certain photographer took a snap-shot of the spillway from down-stream during a flood, and impudently sold it to a magazine as a picture of the finished canal, “with the water turned in!”
“Colonel, could a fish from the Caribbean swim up that mill-race and cross over to the Pacific?”
“I think so, and so does Colonel Goethals. The only question is, Could a saltwater fish live through the thirty-four miles of fresh water in the lakes and the cut?
“As fast as we want the water to back up against the big dam, we keep raising that semicircular concrete dam down there in the spillway. Those openings you see are being fitted with steel gates, and no matter how hard it may rain up in the hills, we’ll always have enough gates to open and let the water through without any danger of its washing over the crest. Now we’ll cross the bridge over the spillway to the other end of the dam, and then run back and go over the locks.”
The elaborate concrete-laying plant at Gatun, which cost over a million dollars to erect here in the wilderness, has nearly finished its mighty task. The tall steel towers, which stand in pairs on each side of the lock-pit and hold aloft the cableways along which traveling-cranes carry the skips of freshly mixed concrete to the forms and return them empty to the little electric cars that go hurrying back to the mixing-house for more, have been moved down to the lower end of the third and lowest lock. By the time this article appears in print they will probably have been taken down and sold for scrap.
RESULTS OF A TYPICAL ROCK SLIDE IN THE CULEBRA CUT